Gerard from Illinois writes the following in the comboxes about Planned Parenthood and the Girl Scout Leadership:
“The Centers for Disease Control report that fully one quarter of our nation’s adolescents have contracted some form of an STD. There are those who would say this is precisely why we need more sex ed and the types of things PP and the Girl Scouts are promoting.
“Others, myself included, contend that the hypersexualization of our society contributes to the scandalous statistic cited above. Where is the outrage?
Is there no outrage because our major media outlets, entertainment venues, and academia join with the likes of PP in perpetuating myths about human sexuality, that we are free to follow what feels good without consequence? Well, that certainly seems to be the sitution today. Meanwhile more and more of our kids are condemned to suffer their whole lives through in some instances due to those diseases even as PP and the Girl Scouts throw gasoline on the fire and no one is held responsible.”
Gerard gives us a great deal of truth to meditate on as Lent lurches inexorably toward Holy Week. As I read his words, I was reminded of Pope John Paul II’s words in his first Encyclical:
Man cannot live without love. He remains a being that is incomprehensible for himself, his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own, if he does not participate intimately in it. This, as has already been said, is why Christ the Redeemer “fully reveals man to himself”. If we may use the expression, this is the human dimension of the mystery of the Redemption. In this dimension man finds again the greatness, dignity and value that belong to his humanity. In the mystery of the Redemption man becomes newly “expressed” and, in a way, is newly created. He is newly created! “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus”64. The man who wishes to understand himself thoroughly-and not just in accordance with immediate, partial, often superficial, and even illusory standards and measures of his being-he must with his unrest, uncertainty and even his weakness and sinfulness, with his life and death, draw near to Christ. He must, so to speak, enter into him with all his own self, he must “appropriate” and assimilate the whole of the reality of the Incarnation and Redemption in order to find himself. If this profound process takes place within him, he then bears fruit not only of adoration of God but also of deep wonder at himself. How precious must man be in the eyes of the Creator, if he “gained so great a Redeemer”65, and if God “gave his only Son “in order that man “should not perish but have eternal life”66.
There is no outrage because the CONSERVATIVE media outlets are promoting the raunchiest, sexiest, most gratuitously violent entertainment available. So much for family values. If Rupert Murdoch’s hottest revenue comes from hot sex and exposed skin, who is going to speak up for toning down the hypersexuality?
I am reminded of a pick-up truck I saw in traffic last year, plastered with a whole variety of bumper stickers. Three stuck in my mind:
I’m not an alcoholic, I’m a drunk. Alcoholics go to meetings.
You’re little princess is my little whore.
Vote Republican!
Siarlus,
I’m a conservative Republican who finds all three of those bumper stickers disgusting; the first two for obvious reasons and the third for putting it on the same bumper as the other two.
Ditto with Fox’s broadcast of raunchy, sexually promiscuous, and gratuitously violent programming. Despite the fact that it likely gives MSNBC’s viewers another option for immoral amusement, it is never good to indulge prurient interests.